


The Uninvited Guest

by Elapid



Series: The Ties That Bind [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Chekhov's kitchen knife, Christmas, Christmas Eve, Comfort/Angst, Death, Doctors & Physicians, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Dynamics, Family Fluff, Family Issues, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Gen, Holidays, Hurt/Comfort, Love, Loving Marriage, M/M, Medical, Medical Trauma, Murder, Near Death, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Past Child Abuse, Surgeons, Surgery, Survivor Guilt, Vulnerability, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:28:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22898005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elapid/pseuds/Elapid
Summary: A gifted heart surgeon takes a break from the relative chaos of his hospital to visit his old family home for a quiet Christmas Eve. The fire is warm, the landscape is picturesque, the house is filled with the smell of cooking food, and the peace is about to be unexpectedly, irrevocably shattered by the arrival of an uninvited guest.
Relationships: Nicklaus Fleischer/Maurice Reynard
Series: The Ties That Bind [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2091090
Comments: 1
Kudos: 7





	The Uninvited Guest

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this story idea stuck in my head, almost completely fleshed out, for nearly four years. Depression is a real bitch when it comes to getting anything done. I finally got some energy and motivation back, and decided to spend it finally getting this typed out.

One of the many things that Nicklaus Fleischer missed about his family’s old hop farming estate house, especially mid-winter, was the fireplace. He didn’t at all mind (practically insisted on, really) taking up the duty of keeping the fire going on Christmas Eve. He carefully rearranged the logs with a wrought-iron poker, making sure the hottest embers were distributed just so before taking four more billets of wood from the nearby rack and adding them to the fireplace.

The job finished, Nicklaus stood upright again, brushing his hands off before glancing to the tastefully decorated Tannenbaum standing before one of the living room windows facing the front of the house. Now, there was something he was glad _had_ changed over the years.

“Thinking fire hazards?” Suddenly hearing his grandfather Oswald’s voice startled the younger man. He’d been so distracted tending the fireplace that he must not have noticed him enter the room.

“A bit,” Nicklaus admitted, turning to face his grandfather. The old man stood nearly a head shorter than his grandson – though, to be fair, a lot of people did – and his once blond hair, practically a family staple, had long since gone completely white. Nicklaus couldn’t help but smile at least a little, seeing the warm expression on his grandfather’s face.

“I mean,” Nicklaus continued, “real candles are pretty and all, but uh… I’d rather not have them on a fir tree filled with volatile compounds and wrapped in tinsel.” He remembered being relieved, even when he was a young child, when his parents had swapped out the dozens of open flames for admittedly nice-looking flickering LED lights. “Still makes me a bit nervous having it in the same room as a fireplace.”

Oswald chuckled warmly, clapping a hand on one of Nicklaus’s shoulders and giving a gentle squeeze. “Child, you’ve got the screen closed over the fireplace and the tree is three meters away.” Coming from anyone else, ‘child’ would have seemed a bit demeaning, but Oswald’s tone always made it clear that it was a term of endearment. “How’s the hospital been treating you?”

Nicklaus had achieved his lifelong goal of becoming a cardiothoracic surgeon five years previous, but his grandfather asked him the same question every time they had contact with one another. It made sense – the old man had inspired Nicklaus at a very young age to pursue medicine. General practitioners might not have been considered by the public to be as ‘distinguished’ as surgeons, but Nicklaus would have argued that his grandfather, though now semi-retired after a long career, had done just as much if not more good. As for the hospital in nearby Landshut…

“Well, it feels like chaos half of the time,” Nicklaus said with a weak chuckle. “I finished training to use the hospital’s new surgical robots earlier this year, that’s made life at least somewhat easier.” For appropriate procedures it made patients’ lives _much_ easier, which was always a plus as far as Nicklaus was concerned. A few tiny cuts were a lot simpler to recover from than having a sternum sawed open. It was a really exciting development, yet Nicklaus’s expression sank a little, and he suddenly found himself trying to focus on something else – the rhythmic ‘ _thunk_ ’ of his father chopping more firewood out behind the house. The change did not go unnoticed.

“Something happened,” Oswald said softly, brows furrowing in concern as he took a seat in the old rocking chair, gesturing for his grandson to sit on the couch next to him.

Nicklaus felt his entire body tense up, but he took a seat. Under normal circumstances, the cushy, leather-upholstered couch would have been perfect to sink into and relax. Nicklaus realized that he was fidgeting with his hands, and quickly folded them in his lap to make them stop.

“I um…” Nicklaus trailed off, forcing his hands to stop fidgeting for a second time, and suddenly finding the old hardwood floor very interesting to look at. “I lost a patient… about a month ago.” After what felt like an eternity of silence, he felt his grandfather’s hand rest on his shoulder again. It was enough, at least, to get Nicklaus to pull his gaze away from the floor and look his grandfather in the face. There was worry there, but not an ounce of judgment, and, somehow, that almost seemed to make things worse. “A pediatric patient,” Nicklaus hesitantly continued. “Four years old.”

“Knowing you, I have the feeling you weren’t at fault,” Oswald stated rather confidently, though there was still a streak of sympathy in his voice.

Nicklaus shook his head. “No. The girl had a connective tissue disorder and was in a car crash with chest trauma that caused an aortic dissection.” The deck had been stacked against her and everyone on Nicklaus’s team. Aortic dissection repair was risky under the best possible circumstances – things didn’t tend to go well when the largest blood vessel in the human body was pulling itself apart. Going in front of the hospital’s peer review panel had been hard enough, even though they had rendered a swift and clear decision of no fault on Nicklaus’s part. The much, much more difficult part of it all had been not only telling the girl’s parents that she was dead, but also telling them, as delicately as possible, that the trauma that caused the dissection likely never would have happened if they’d had their daughter in a car seat, like she was supposed to be. Nicklaus sniffled quietly, and only just managed to hold back the tears that were threatening to well up in his eyes.

Oswald sighed softly, giving Nicklaus’s shoulder another little squeeze. “I know you already know this, but, it’s worth reminding – it’s part of the job. The worst part of the job, but, you practice medicine long enough, losing a patient is almost inevitable.” And, opening up people’s chest cavities was inherently more risky than general practice. “Why don’t you go help Tilly in the kitchen while I see if Adam’s ready to start hauling the firewood in?”

Nicklaus frowned slightly at that. He’d enjoyed helping his mother in the kitchen since he was a child but didn’t really like the idea of his elderly grandfather trying to help haul firewood in through the cold and snow. Granted, Oswald might have just been planning on a bit of father-son time, but, just in case, “I can help with the firewood, it’s not a big deal. Shouldn’t take long, then I can help mom in the kitchen.”

Oswald laughed softly as he stood up from the rocking chair. “You might be the only person in this house built like a rugby lock, but this old man can still carry a few sticks of firewood.”

Sighing quietly, Nicklaus gave a little nod. “All right.” He stood up, himself, though he hesitated for a moment, watching Oswald collect his coat and gloves and go to the back door. Only once his grandfather was outside did Nicklaus finally head to the kitchen.

The living room had smelled faintly of wood smoke and evergreen. The kitchen, though… Nicklaus couldn’t help but smile a little bit. There was sauerbraten – no doubt having sat marinating for a week – heating in the oven along with stollen bread. Tilly was managing a pot of potato dumplings and a skillet of sausage stuffing.

“This all looks like an awful lot of work,” Nicklaus said with a chuckle, leaning down a little so his mother could reach to kiss him on the cheek. “I’d be happy to take some of it off of your hands.” He’d been eager to help his mother cook since he’d been old enough to walk. It was something he’d quickly stopped talking about in front of his schoolmates, though. Apparently, boys weren’t supposed to work in the kitchen, nor were they supposed to be as small as he’d been at that age. That was a thought Nicklaus quickly pushed aside – a task that had gotten considerably easier over time.

“I’ve got the stuffing and the dumplings handled, dear,” Tilly replied. “The stollen’s almost done, though, Adam’s been so well-behaved I haven’t kept the kitchen knife sharp,” she added with a mischievous smile.

Nicklaus honestly wondered sometimes how his parents had ever gotten together. His father tended to be soft-spoken and come off as stoic, stern, and even a little cold to people who didn’t know him. His mother, though – Tilly was almost fearlessly outspoken, with wits as sharp as a razor. Despite the perceived differences, though, Nicklaus had never in his life heard or seen the two truly fight. He’d overheard a minor argument here or there, but things almost always seemed to get talked out to some understanding or agreement.

“Mom, as often as you’d use one, you might want to invest in a cake knife.” Nicklaus picked up the kitchen knife in question, resting the cutting edge of the blade on a downward-tilted fingernail and frowning slightly as it slid right off. The knives in his own kitchen remained meticulously sharpened, though in the back of his head he knew that was at least in part due to some moderate mental pathology. Thank goodness for modern psychiatric medication. It took him a moment to remember which drawer the sharpener was in, but, once he’d found it, he quickly set to fixing up the edge of the kitchen knife.

Once Nicklaus had settled on just the right angle to run the blade up the sharpener, he found himself looking out the window. Usually he didn’t care for how early it got dark this time of year. There was a blanket of fresh snow on the ground, though, and the light from the full moon through a clear sky almost seemed to render it faintly aglow. This particular winter night was actually rather beautiful.

Nicklaus briefly glanced back over his shoulder, toward the living room, as he heard his father and grandfather reenter the house through the back door, talking about what the upcoming spring might be like for growing their hops. His attention, however, was quickly back on the kitchen knife. He set the sharpener down, and once again rested the edge of the blade on a downward-tilted fingernail. The blade didn’t move. Satisfied with his work, Nicklaus put the sharpener away, and took the knife to the sink for a quick rinse.

“Just in time,” Tilly said with a smile. “Stollen should be cooled off enough by now.”

Nicklaus frowned slightly at that, turning to see that, yes, the stollen was on the cooling rack, thoroughly dusted with confectioners’ sugar. Apparently, he’d been so engrossed in the scenery outside and sharpening the knife that he hadn’t even noticed his mother taking the bread out of the oven. “I’ll go ahead and cut it.” He quickly washed and dried his hands before moving the stollen onto a cutting board, taking the kitchen knife with him. It wasn’t the ideal tool for the job, but, having been freshly sharpened, the blade worked just fine as he began to cut the loaf into slices.

Nicklaus’s attention was suddenly seized by something else, though, and he paused in slicing the bread to look out the window facing the front yard, again. There were headlights coming down the long, winding driveway, but his family wasn’t expecting any more company.

“Hey, there’s someone coming up the driveway,” Nicklaus said, just loud enough that the two men conversing in the living room would hear, as well.

Tilly chuckled softly, turning off the stovetop and finally removing the sauerbraten from the oven. “My money’s on lost tourists, again.”

That wasn’t too uncommon an occurrence, especially around the holidays. There was a small handful of households in the general area that had family members from abroad, usually the United States or Canada. Once they left the well-signed and GPS-friendly streets of Landshut and were out in the country, they understandably tended to lose track of where they were going. The Fleischers had lived in the area for so long that they were reasonably well-acquainted with almost every other family around, which made giving directions a fairly simple matter.

“Chevrolet, you don’t see those very often,” Nicklaus idly remarked as he watched the truck park, triggering the motion lights out front. The driver side door of the truck opened, and Nicklaus felt his blood run cold when the motion lights illuminated the man that stepped out.

He couldn’t fully remember what his uncle had been growling at him about (the go-to was usually along the lines of not properly standing up for himself when picked on at school for his, at the time, small stature), but Nicklaus vividly remembered his ten-year-old self finally snapping back at his uncle to leave him alone – that the man was just as bad as any school bully. Nicklaus raised a trembling hand to rest on his left cheek. He even more vividly remembered the faint smell of alcohol as his uncle shouted at him for talking back and struck him hard across the face – hard enough to knock him to the floor.

It wasn’t the first time his uncle had hit him (there was a reason Nicklaus had always dreaded the man’s visits), but it was certainly the hardest. It had also turned out to be the most reckless.

“Gunar Fleischer!” Nicklaus had never heard his grandfather raise his voice, and he’d never expected he would, much less against one of his own sons. Oswald had witnessed what had happened, though, and the expression on his face was one that Nicklaus had never seen on the man before or since – pure, unadulterated fury.

Adam, who had walked in right on Oswald’s heels, quickly collected Nicklaus from the floor and carried him upstairs to his room, quietly closing the door behind before sitting on the bed. He held his son close, trying to offer both comfort and distraction as the voices downstairs began to grow even louder. There was no drowning them out, though, and Nicklaus soon heard his mother join the fray as well, making very clear what she’d like to do to her brother-in-law.

After a few more minutes of shouting, Nicklaus heard the front door slam shut, followed by the sound of his uncle’s car tearing down the driveway, away from the house. His parents and grandfather would tell the boy a few days later that they had spoken with a judge, and his uncle was no longer allowed to visit the property. _Ever_.

‘Ever’, it turned out, had wound up being a subjective term for his uncle, and Nicklaus nearly jumped out of his skin, tightening his grip on the kitchen knife, when he heard a few firm knocks on the front door. He looked to his mother setting the sauerbraten out, to his father adjusting a bit of tinsel that had slipped off a branch of the fir tree, to his grandfather reaching for the handle of the front door.

“ _Don’t_ -!” The rest of Nicklaus’s attempted warning was cut off as his uncle slammed the door open with a hard shove, pushing a startled Oswald back several steps. Gunar walked into the house, the expression on his face one of calculating hatred as he raised a snubnosed revolver to aim directly at his own father’s head.

Nicklaus turned on his heel and sprinted toward the entryway, but it felt like one of those awful dreams where, no matter how fast he ran, the space in front of him seemed to stretch on eternally, forever pulling his goal away with it. Everything seemed to move painfully slow. He saw Gunar pull the hammer back, heard it click into place. There was no way Gunar could miss his target from one meter away, and the deafening bang as he pulled the trigger was accompanied by a messy spray of red. Oswald dropped lifelessly to the floor. Gunar had finally killed one of the two people he hated most in the world, and the second was running right to him.

Oswald was gone. His grandfather was dead, and Nicklaus felt like the world had practically come to a standstill. Somewhere in the back of his head he knew it was the adrenaline rush. The more conscious parts of his brain, almost overwhelmed with fear and agony and rage, planned to use that rush to keep Gunar from killing everyone else in the house. It wasn’t the most sophisticated plan, but it was all that Nicklaus could manage as he hit Gunar with a running tackle, throwing them both to the floor.

Nicklaus had Gunar pinned underneath him, and he could very clearly see the look of shocked disbelief on the other man’s face. The last time they had seen one another, Nicklaus was small even for his age, and had been expected to stay that way. That prediction had fallen apart, and then some, after a few more years had passed. Gunar clearly hadn’t expected his nephew to tower over him, nor for his weight to be able to pin him down.

Nicklaus held Gunar’s shoulder down against the floor with his left hand while he raised the kitchen knife with his right. He took what felt like only a fraction of a second to approximate as best he could the position of Gunar’s ribs underneath the man’s shirt and skin. Fifth left intercostal space, midclavicular line – the heart would lie directly beneath. Another fraction of a second to take aim, and Nicklaus slammed the knife down. His uncle managed to move just enough that the stab missed its intended target, nicking against a rib before punching into the fourth left intercostal space, puncturing a lung, instead.

Ears ringing, heart pounding, still pushed by adrenaline-fueled rage and terror, Nicklaus raised the knife back up and slammed it down again. This time it hit home. Nicklaus didn’t care. He brought the knife down again, and again, until he found that he couldn’t raise his arm anymore. The limb felt absolutely leaden – all of his limbs did, and he only just managed to push himself back away from his uncle’s lifeless body before collapsing onto the floor, himself.

It was hard to breathe, then there was the sudden, blinding pain. Nicklaus managed to lift his head up enough to see two spots of dark red blooming across his shirt over his lower right abdomen. He’d been so consumed by the task of ‘neutralizing’ his uncle that he hadn’t noticed the man pull the trigger twice more.

“Oh…” Nicklaus murmured as he watched blood continue to spread across the fabric of his clothing. His thoughts felt muddy, slow, which was in sharp contrast to how fast his heart was beating. “That’s bad…” he added, the words partially slurring together. His vision was starting to waver, too, and he was only just aware of his mother kneeling over him, having slipped a hand under his head before it could fall back against the hardwood floor.

Nicklaus tried to sit up, but found the weight of his own body to be far too much to lift. On top of the unbearable pain in his abdomen, he was starting to feel very tired. His eyes closed briefly, but he managed to force them open again when he felt his mother use her free hand to brush a few strands of blond hair out of his face.

“Sweetie, look at me,” Tilly said between sniffles, a faint edge of desperation in her voice. “Look here, look at me, you need to stay awake. Your father has emergency services on the phone, they’ll be here soon, but you have to stay awake.”

Nicklaus couldn’t help but feel a little guilty – he hated to see family worrying over him. “S’fine…” he muttered. “M’fine.” The slurring was getting worse. He tried and failed to sit up again, and felt something hot, damp, and sticky soaked into the fabric and clinging to the skin at his lower back. It hurt there, too, just from the pressure of his own weight resting on the area. At least one of the bullets, it seemed, had gone all the way through. At the edge of his vision, Nicklaus could see blood gradually pooling out over the hardwood floor from beneath his lower back.

He started to let his eyes slide shut, again, but they quickly snapped open when Nicklaus felt something push down against his injured abdomen. He let out a choked scream, reflexively reaching down to shove away whatever it was that was hurting him. He didn’t have the strength or coordination, though, to remove what he finally saw to be his father’s hands firmly pressing a clean tea towel over the two entry wounds.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry- I’m so sorry,” Adam stammered out, sounding a great deal like he was trying not to panic as he attempted to staunch the bleeding. “They’re sending a helicopter, they should be here in just a few minutes.”

Nicklaus’s vision was being consumed by a gray tunnel that narrowed down to a point of light which rapidly vanished, leaving him lost in the haze. He could hear voices, but they were distant, and jumbled and soon faded away as well. The fog shifted, finally revealing a figure that Nicklaus could see clearly crouching over him – himself.

“This is your fault, you know,” the Other-Him stated matter-of-factly, deep blue eyes accusatory, staring directly into Nicklaus’s. The voice was clear, but had a faint, otherworldly echo to it. “Opa’s dead because of you.”

That… that hurt… almost as badly as the two point-blank gunshots. Granted, the sensation from the injuries, along with the sensations of everything else, had dulled significantly, and Nicklaus wasn’t sure whether that should make him feel relieved or worried.

The Other-Him leaned in closer, voice sharp and cold as he spoke again. “If you hadn’t talked back, none of this would have happened.”

“SHUT _UP_!” Nicklaus wasn’t sure if he had managed to actually get the words out, or if he’d only imagined he did. His mental questioning, however, was brought to an abrupt end. He felt something strike him hard in the chest, and most of the fog instantly evaporated, along with the Other-Him. The downside of him at least somewhat returning to his senses was that the pain came rushing back as well. He couldn’t see his parents anymore, but he could vaguely hear them. There were more people leaning over him, though – different people. The new people were wearing bright orange jackets with reflective striping on them and were talking amongst themselves too quickly for Nicklaus to follow, and his shirt was missing for some reason.

The new people, three of them, looked familiar, and one of them in particular Nicklaus was fairly certain he knew from work, at least once her face had come somewhat into focus. “Oh, hi Katja,” Nicklaus murmured. Yes, he knew her, and he’d definitely seen the other two, as well. “Did you get something done with your hair? It looks nice.” He was completely oblivious of how quietly he was talking, and how some of the syllables sort of ran together.

“I did, thank you,” Katja said with a nod, though her smile seemed a little strained. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Nicklaus Fleischer,” the response came, after what seemed like far too long to process such a simple question. He did notice the feeling of something stuck to his skin, though – on the front of his right shoulder and against his left side. “Are those A…” he trailed off, feeling terribly exhausted, terribly out of breath, and terribly cold, to say nothing of the still-lingering pain. “Are those AED pads?”

“Yes, they are, Doctor Fleischer,” Katja replied with a nod before she and the other two paramedics shifted him onto a gurney. “Do you know what the date is today?”

In seemingly an instant the gurney was in its raised position, and Nicklaus was strapped down with a blanket draped over him. If he were more cognizant, he would have been much more deeply disturbed by the fact that he couldn’t remember any of those things happening. “The twenty-fourth of December, twenty twenty-five.” Nicklaus saw one of the male paramedics nod to him in the affirmative. The man’s mouth was moving, but Nicklaus couldn’t make out any words… not clearly, at least. It was all a jumbled mess. The bright orange of the paramedics’ jackets was starting to bleed out, mixing with the colors around and behind them. Then everything started to grow dull again. The quiet dark was interrupted by Other-Him’s voice, the only clear thing in that place.

“Opa would still be alive if you’d just kept quiet.” The words cut deeply. The guilt they engendered cut even deeper.

The darkness abated. The pain returned, though thankfully somewhat dulled. There was a mask strapped over Nicklaus’s nose and mouth, and it felt just a little easier to breathe. He could hear the rhythmic thumping of helicopter blades, and the voices of the paramedics. Everything went dark, again.

“If nothing else,” Other-Him started, “you could have taken that bullet for him, and given him a chance.”

Lights passed overhead at even intervals. Nicklaus could see more people at the warped edges of his vision, wearing white coats and scrubs. Everything went dark again.

Other-Him’s voice returned. “It’s your fault he’s dead. And, now you’re a murderer, as well. You were _eager_ to use that knife. ‘First do no harm’, right?”

The words echoed – seemed like they would have kept echoing endlessly until an almost blindingly bright light suddenly burned them away. The world had stopped moving, and there were more people, but the most that Nicklaus could make out were wavering silhouettes. The silhouettes were speaking, but their voices were unintelligible. Everything went dark, again.

This dark was different, though. There was no Other-Him. Everything was quiet, and felt peaceful, and at long last, nothing hurt. For a moment, the thought crossed Nicklaus’s mind that he was dying. That thought should have frightened him more, should have prompted him to try to reach out and grab hold of something… anything. He couldn’t muster the strength, though, and simply let himself slip into the enveloping dark.

***

One of the many things that Nicklaus Fleischer missed about his family’s old hop farming estate house, especially mid-winter, was the fireplace. He didn’t at all mind (practically insisted on, really) taking up the duty of keeping the fire going on Christmas Eve. He carefully rearranged the logs with a wrought-iron poker, making sure the hottest embers were distributed just so before taking four more billets of wood from the nearby rack and adding them to the fireplace.

The job finished, Nicklaus stood upright again, brushing his hands off before glancing to the tastefully decorated Tannenbaum standing before one of the living room windows facing the front of the house. His attention, however, was quickly drawn to the old rocking chair and the couch next to it, where he and his grandfather had sat and spoken three years previous about candles and fireplaces and the most difficult part of practicing medicine. Nicklaus found it darkly ironic, then, that he himself had nearly _been_ that most difficult part for one of his colleagues at the hospital.

“The through-and-through just grazed your inferior vena cava.” Doctor Sommer, the hospital’s attending vascular surgeon, was used to working _with_ Nicklaus, and had no doubt never suspected that she would wind up working _on_ him. She had come into her patient’s hospital room to check on him shortly after hearing he was awake. “We were pretty worried about you there for awhile. From the point of injury to the completion of surgery, you lost a little over half of your total blood volume.”

That was… well, to put it simply, a lot. With that kind of hemorrhaging Nicklaus would have been dead for sure were it not for the transfusion of several units of synthetic blood, and, of course, the speedy repair of one of the largest blood vessels in his body. He was lucky – if the bullet had struck his vena cava more directly, he probably wouldn’t have lived to make it aboard the helicopter, much less to the operating room.

Once he’d finally woken up and mended somewhat, Nicklaus had to deal with police interviews. He had been assured more than once that he wasn’t being accused of anything. He had been more than a little disturbed, however, when one of the officers he’d spoken with told him he’d stabbed his uncle seven times. He had lost count in the middle of the chaos, to be honest, though he was damn near certain that Gunar had died after the second or third strike. Up to that point, he’d thought he simply didn’t have it within himself to intentionally take a life. Had the ‘excess’ been because of fear – the fear that if he didn’t absolutely succeed in killing his uncle, the man would murder the rest of his family – or had it been because of rage, or hatred?

Nicklaus jumped slightly when he felt a hand rest gently on his shoulder. He glanced briefly to it – adorned with a hammer finished platinum band nearly identical to the one on his own right ring finger – before lifting his gaze to the man attached to it.

“You’re doing it again,” Maurice said quietly, the concern obvious in his green eyes as he gave the blond’s shoulder a small squeeze, again.

“Doing what aga- oh…” Nicklaus looked away from the dark-haired man next to him long enough to verify that, yes, he’d started turning his wedding band around his finger, again. It was just a new form of fidgeting, but at least being made aware of it meant that he could force himself to stop doing it.

Maurice hummed quietly, frowning slightly when he caught sight of himself in a wall mirror near the fireplace. He ran his fingers through lightly waxed hair, completely unbothered by the occasional silver strands, but seemingly content after having fixed his styling back up. As much as the man enjoyed the look of a bespoke three-piece suit, he had also been relieved to hear from Nicklaus that casual dress was fine for the small family Christmas. ‘Casual dress’ had turned out to be a rather form-fitting Daft Punk concert tee and black skinny slacks that Nicklaus found a bit distracting when his husband was turned away from him. Worse, Nicklaus’s mother had noticed said ‘distraction’ and given him a blatantly approving look. Just thinking about it would have made his face heat, if he didn’t already have considerably darker things on his mind.

“You’re thinking about him,” Maurice said with an arched brow, easily falling back to sit on the couch.

Nicklaus heaved a shaky sigh before taking a seat next to the other man. He leaned back into the couch, letting his eyes slide shut. “Yes.” It was an admission he’d have had a much more difficult time making to anyone else. Not that an admission was needed. His fixation on three years ago had been blatantly obvious earlier in the evening, getting ready for supper. He could have sworn he’d seen headlights coming up the driveway as he sliced the stollen in the kitchen. Tilly had needed to insist on finishing the job herself to get her son to release his death grip on the kitchen knife. She’d suggested that he go help his father finish chopping more firewood until supper was ready. It was an invitation that Nicklaus had taken, and, if he was being perfectly honest with himself, he had been bringing the axe down far harder than was necessary, and now his shoulders ached.

" _Brûle en l’enfer_ ," Maurice practically hissed out in his native tongue, idly slipping an arm around the blond’s shoulders. “Though I guess in my case, I _wish_ there was a Hell for him to burn in,” he murmured. “You deserved so much better...”

Nicklaus hummed quietly. At the moment, his mind was, for better or for worse, less on his uncle and more on someone else. “I think Opa would have liked you,” he said with a faint smile. Oswald hadn’t been near the firebrand Tilly was, but he’d still had a bit of a playful, ornery streak. Nicklaus shot the other man an almost apologetic glance, giving an awkward chuckle. “Sorry my dad’s so, uh…”

“Hey, I actually saw him smile a few months ago, during the wedding!” Maurice said with a laugh. “I think he’s just protective of you.”

‘Protective’ was probably a good word for it. Nicklaus had still been recovering from surgery in the ICU when the story had hit the largest paper in Landshut. The article itself was perfectly accurate (and, much to the chagrin of the entire family, included names), describing the stabbing as being in self-defense. The headline, however, right on the front page, in bold print, had read, “Local Surgeon Involved in Double Murder”. Nicklaus had been a bit out of it on pain meds, but did remember his usually rather quiet father stepping out of the room as he rung up the Editor in Chief, and promptly threatened to sue the paper out of existence if they didn’t post an immediate retraction on the ‘slander’ of his son.

The online version of the article had a corrected headline (and an apology) within minutes. The printed edition had followed suit the next day, front page and all. Nicklaus had the feeling that the quick action on part of the paper had a lot less to do with him being a doctor than it did with his family’s local prominence for their longstanding, large hectarage of hops, and their equally longstanding relationship with an even more prominent local brewer.

Three years, and, when he thought about it, the whole thing still felt painfully fresh. Nicklaus hadn’t even realized that tears had started welling in his eyes until his husband gently brushed them away, pressing a quick kiss to his forehead and pulling him a little closer.

“Hey, you, it’s like two in the morning,” Maurice pointed out. “We should both go upstairs and get some sleep before we head back home tomorrow. A couple more days of quiet, then you can go back to saving people’s lives, and I can go back to taking pictures for people who have more money than they know what to do with,” he said with a chuckle. “Sound good?”

Nicklaus couldn’t help but chuckle as well at the other man’s description of his own photography business. It was quite the talent, really – Maurice almost always seemed to be able to pull a laugh out of him.

“Sounds good.”

**Author's Note:**

> My hope is to type up a few other short stories focused around Nicklaus that sort of work around/attach to this one. If I do, you're going to start seeing some supernatural stuff. I'll just have to wait and see if the depression stays somewhat at bay and I can shake loose some more energy and motivation. Regardless, thank you for reading this one, and I hope you enjoyed!


End file.
